By Rafael Pinto Borges, European Conservative.
Francisco Henriques da Silva is Portugal’s former ambassador to Hungary, India, Mexico, and a number of other countries. He is also an incisive conservative thinker and a prolific writer. We sat down with him to speak about his latest book, Cultural Wars and the Woke Threat and whether wokeism is in retreat or is here to stay.
The book Cultural Wars and the Woke Threat addresses a burning issue in contemporary debate. How would you define the concept of “woke” in the context of the book, and why do you consider this ideology a threat to Western societies?
We can define “woke” as a movement advocating for social justice from a radical leftist perspective, focusing on issues such as racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, environmentalism, and vegetarianism, among others. It involves an active and militant fight against all forms of discrimination, implying a break with the past to create a new culture and, consequently, the elimination of any dissenting voices.
Woke is, therefore, a fundamentalist movement aimed at raising awareness of alleged past and present racial and social injustices. Originating in the African-American community, it stems from the concept of being “awake” or vigilant, which then extends to society at large, where all groups allegedly subjected to discrimination identify with the dichotomous logic of oppressor/oppressed, dominator/dominated, exploiter/exploited. From the notion of being “awake” (woke), it transitions to the punitive concept of “cancel culture,” which is inherently linked: if we are awake to discrimination, we must cancel (ban) those who discriminate.
Ultimately, wokeism seeks to change the civilizational and cultural matrix of the West, erasing the principles, values, and references of the legacy of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome, as well as the Enlightenment, science, and technology—in short, the world we have built.
In summary, all negative attributes that mark history—slavery, racism, colonialism, oppression of minorities and peoples, genocide, etc.—are deemed the exclusive responsibility of the West. Other peoples and cultures are exempt from any sins, or if they exist, they are deemed irrelevant, marginal, and inconsequential. Thus, there persists a diffuse and often incoherent capital of grievance rooted in resentment, aiming for an unrelenting struggle and, ultimately, the eradication of Western culture.